by Heather Levy
She remembered the December day Isaac had picked her up from school. Afterward, she woke up on a pile of dirty blankets in what looked to be an abandoned shack of a house. She was alone, her clothes on but her leggings haphazardly pulled up and her boots missing. And the pain. There had been so much pain, worse than any cramping from a period.
Her baby.
When she woke again, it was morning and Isaac held her to his chest murmuring to her. She thought she heard him say something like, “Thank God we found you.” Her mom was there too, standing near Isaac, her face drawn and pale.
Eight days—how long it had taken for the fetus to fully pass out of her body. Her mom refused to take her to the hospital, afraid the police would arrest Sam for murder even after she repeatedly told her mama she didn’t cause the abortion. She didn’t believe Sam’s story about Isaac picking her up from school and then her passing out. Maybe her mom believed her deep down, but she didn’t want to accept what Isaac was capable of.
At the time, Sam thought her subconscious had created the woman’s voice, that her mind didn’t want to admit what Isaac had done to her, his betrayal. Isaac hadn’t done it alone, though. He needed someone who knew what they were doing. Her next thought made her face go numb.
She looked at Meredith. “Did Isaac help your mother…with you?”
The evening was warm, but Meredith shivered. She hugged her body tight as if her insides would spill out if she relaxed too much, which was exactly how Sam felt right then.
“Yeah. He held me.”
Meredith had told her about Vickie tricking her into trying a chalky-tasting drink, which Meredith spit out after one sip. Meredith had felt everything until Eric fired a couple of rounds at Vickie and Isaac, missing but prompting the neighbors to call the police.
Meredith wasn’t like her. She didn’t crave pain. And Eric wasn’t like Isaac.
Sam was sure of the answer now, but she felt compelled to ask it anyway. She needed to hear Meredith say it.
“Did Eric ever rape you?”
Meredith continued to hug herself. She looked up at Sam, her eyes glistening from tears.
“No.”
Sam felt her muscles relax. For a moment, she wanted to hug Meredith, to tell her she wasn’t alone, but a thought stopped her.
“Why did you lie to the police about what happened? You let Eric go to juvenile hall when he protected you.”
Meredith hugged herself tighter.
“I didn’t have anyone else.” She looked Sam in the eyes. “And Isaac and my mother were good liars.”
Sam looked up at the apartment window. Caleb was still staring down at them.
“Who’s Caleb’s father?”
Meredith relaxed her arms. “I don’t want to know if it’s Isaac.”
Sam’s eyes flicked to the boy at the window again.
“Don’t you think Caleb deserves to know?”
Meredith stopped hugging herself. “Eric and I only had sex one time.”
Sam crossed her arms. She understood Meredith’s desire not to know, especially since there was a strong chance of Isaac being the father, but she also knew tying Caleb to Isaac could help convince the detectives that Eric wasn’t lying about what happened in Anadarko.
“The police are looking at Eric,” Sam said. “But if they knew what your mother did, what Isaac did, if they heard it directly from you…”
“Then I could be a suspect.”
Sam sighed. Meredith was probably right.
“Did Isaac send your mother money for you and Caleb?”
“Didn’t matter if he did. I never saw a dime of it.”
Meredith’s mouth dropped open a little, as if she knew she said too much.
“Maybe he stopped sending your mother money and she wanted something bad to happen to him.”
Meredith laughed, short and harsh. “You don’t know my mother at all. She would’ve done anything for Isaac. Anything. She loved him.” She let out another stunted laugh. “More than she loved me.”
Meredith started up the stairs. Sam had more questions, but Meredith was clearly done with the conversation.
“Tell the detectives what really happened to you,” Sam said. “Please.”
Meredith paused at the top of the steps and looked back at Sam.
“You just want to pin Isaac’s murder on someone else, anyone else but Eric, don’t you?”
“He didn’t do it.”
“You’re so sure, huh?”
“Yes.” It was the first time doubt didn’t try to creep in.
Meredith looked over in the direction of Zeus yipping in Sam’s car.
“Well, if you’re going to point a finger at my mother, you should get a bigger dog.”
Chapter 46: Arrow, 1994
Arrow saw the blood as he was taking a piss in the middle of the night.
His father and Jeri had found Sam out in the woods in some old shack, brought her back to the house wrapped in a baby-blue afghan. Arrow caught a glimpse of her dead eyes and chalk complexion and understood something was very wrong with her. All he knew was she was gone the night before. He overhead his father tell Jeri he had called Sam’s friend Chrissy first thing in the morning and that Chrissy had admitted to dropping Sam off near the place where they found her. Arrow immediately recognized it for the lie it was, and he imagined a hundred different horrific acts that could’ve happened in the shack with his father.
Then, while peeing late at night, he saw it—a glistening, crimson slug slithering down the inside of the toilet bowl, not quite making it to the water. His hand hovered on the toilet handle, his heart on the pink tile floor. He couldn’t flush it.
Someone opened the bathroom door as he stared at the toilet. It was Sam, wearing his Tool T-shirt and pajama shorts. She walked past him, not speaking or bothering to close the door. He shut it softly, locking it, and turned to see her sitting on the toilet, her shorts and underwear around her ankles.
She grimaced, holding her breath, and he knew there’d be more blood-slugs in the toilet. He saw mucus-red on a pad stuck to her underwear too.
“I’m going to kill him,” he said, loud enough for Sam to hear.
She turned her head to him. There was nothing behind her eyes.
“When your mom goes to your Aunt Shelley’s, I’m going to do it.”
Jeri was supposed to visit her sister in Dallas the week before Christmas. At least, he hoped she was still going. It didn’t matter, but he didn’t want his stepmom around. He didn’t really want Grandma Haylin around either, but she’d be busy baking for the church fundraiser.
Sam looked at the bathtub. He saw her gaze stuck on his razor, her face blank. After a minute, she wiped herself, going for more toilet paper several times. Each pass, he saw less and less blood. She didn’t pause before flushing and his stomach lurched.
She tried to move past him to get to the door, but he stopped her. He held her, and she was a wood block in his arms. He held her tighter and her hands grazed his back before dropping to her sides again.
“I’ll kill him,” he chanted in her ear. “I’ll kill him.”
She shook her head against his shoulder.
“You can’t.” Her voice was as flat as freshly turned farmland. “He’ll kill you first.”
“I’ll never let him hurt you again,” he said. “I promise.”
He pulled back from her to see her face. It was still vacant.
He walked her to her bedroom and lay next to her on her bed, not caring if anyone walked in and saw them together. It didn’t matter now. His father had already taken everything, but he wouldn’t hurt Sam again. He’d never hurt her again. Arrow would sleep next to her every night to make sure of it.
Sam didn’t cry, didn’t move.
He covered them both with her thick comforter, pressed closer to her back as he held her.
He started to drift into sleep when Sam touched his hand.
“We have to do it together,” she whispered.
Chapter 47: Sam, 2009
The sun was too bright and high once Sam woke up, her clothes from the day before clinging to her sweaty skin. She forgot to set her alarm and the clock blinked back ten-twenty. At first, she rushed to get ready for work, letting Zeus out in the backyard before taking a quick shower. She got dressed and any desire to go to work drained from her. She was already severely late, which she had never been before, and she couldn’t imagine managing a bunch of nineteen-year-olds without wanting to kill each and every one of them. She would save any murderous thoughts for Vickie, whom she found information on within a few clicks and searches on her laptop.
She grabbed her cellphone from her charger and saw several missed calls. No calls from Eric, which she found weird. She dialed his number and it went to voicemail.
She was about to call in sick to her work when her phone rang.
It was her mom. She thought about ignoring the call, but something tugged on her to answer.
“Hey, Mama, let me call you—”
“Eric’s in jail. Thought you might like to know.”
Shit. Sam inhaled slowly and closed her eyes. She should’ve checked her messages first thing, but she had been so focused on Vickie and everything Meredith told her the night before.
“I just saw him.” Her mom’s voice came out in a tremble. “Eric, he—he didn’t look good.”
Sam swallowed over the desert in her throat.
The tremor in her mom’s voice increased as she said, “I’m so sorry, Sammy.”
Why would her mom be sorry? Sam assumed she’d would be happy about Eric being in jail.
“The detectives asked me about the pocketknife they found,” her mom said.
Sam gripped her phone hard.
“Did you want them to arrest him, Mama?”
“Of course not.”
“You wanted him out of my life, right? Is that why you pointed them to him?”
“No, honey, I wasn’t thinking that at all, but I knew they’d find out about the knife.”
“What if I did it, Mama?”
“You didn’t.”
“But you don’t know,” Sam said. “You don’t anything about me and what I’m capable of.”
“Of course, I know you, honey. Why are saying this?”
“I liked it. I liked what Isaac did to me.” Sam knew it wasn’t the full truth, but she didn’t care. She wanted her words to cut.
“What?”
“He knew I liked pain, so he gave me what I wanted.”
“Sammy, stop saying this.”
It didn’t matter what Sam said now because nothing could change, and she would always be this way, searching out the kind of pain Isaac gave her and never finding it, not with herself, not even with Eric. The thoughts brimmed until they gushed from her, a flooded dam during a storm and she didn’t care what debris hit her mom.
“You knew, didn’t you, Mama? You knew before the attack. You knew what he did, and you did nothing.”
“Sammy, please. Let me come to you. We can talk about this, okay?”
Sam took a deep breath. She could manage the anger again; she could hold it in.
“It’s fine, Mama. I’m fine now. That’s what you want to hear, right?”
“Sammy—”
She hung up, her mom’s voice haunting the kitchen.
She sat at her dining table, thinking over everything, Eric in jail and how she could possibly exonerate him. The idea of telling the detectives the truth about the attack crossed her mind, but she knew it was a bad idea. They already had enough ammunition against Eric.
After what Meredith told her, Sam knew in her gut Vickie had killed Isaac. Before, revenge was Sam’s only thought, and she had imagined going to Vickie’s place, her handgun pointed at the woman until she confessed everything. Sam couldn’t be stupid about this. She needed help.
She picked up her cellphone, did a quick search, and called the crappy diner where Meredith worked.
“I need to talk with you,” Sam said when Meredith got on the line. “Can we meet?”
Sam met Meredith outside of the diner, which appeared dead even with it being lunchtime. They sat on a nearby bench, the summer heat bearing down on them.
“I only have fifteen minutes for my break,” Meredith said.
“Eric’s in jail.”
Meredith’s mouth dropped open a little.
“I know you don’t want to talk to the police,” Sam said, “but they need to know what your mom and Isaac did to you.”
Meredith shook her head. “I can’t. Caleb doesn’t know about any of this. Going to the police—if he finds out about Isaac, it’ll mess him up. He’s been through enough already.”
Sam expected her to say that. She wiped away the sweat about to drip into her eyes.
“So, you’re okay with letting Eric take the fall for something your mother did?”
Meredith’s mouth tightened.
“You really think you have it all figured out, huh?” Meredith smirked. “Isaac said you were smart, but maybe he was wrong. Either way, I’m sure he had fun breaking you.”
Sam opened her mouth to say he didn’t break her, but she stopped herself. She had let Isaac break her because the rush of pain meant more than Eric’s love. Because it was tangible. Pain was something she knew how to fight, knew how to accept.
She looked at Meredith, at her spindly arms and legs like a girl’s, like what Isaac did to her stunted her growth and kept her in perpetual adolescence.
“He broke you too.”
“Fuck you.”
Tears formed in Meredith’s eyes, and Sam felt the tug to hold her.
“Meredith, listen—”
“No, you listen.” Meredith brushed away the tears from her face. “You don’t know what Isaac took from me. I’m glad he’s dead, and I don’t fucking care who did it.” She looked down at her lap, her hands pressed together. “I’ve had to fight to be where I am now, and I’m not going to let this shit destroy that.”
Sam took a deep breath, trying to get the words to exit her lips. She didn’t want to talk about it, but she needed Meredith to know. She looked up and kept eye contact with Meredith.
“I do know what Isaac took from you.” Sam paused, pushing down the pain wanting to explode from her chest. “What your mother and Isaac tried to do to you—they succeeded with me.” She took another breath, willing the words out. “I’ll never be able to have kids.”
Meredith slumped on the bench as if all the toughness in her drained out. She appeared to weigh everything, her face screwed up in thought.
“Shit,” Meredith said.
“Please tell the detectives what really happened to you, how Eric helped you and Caleb.”
“How will that help Eric?”
“If you tell them,” Sam said, “your mother will pay for what she did. Even if it doesn’t help Eric, people will know the truth. Don’t you want that so you can move on?”
Meredith stared at the ground for several brutally silent moments.
Sam reached out and took her hand. “You can do this.”
Meredith looked up at her. She was crying.
“You can. We both can.”
Sam squeezed her hand, nodding, and Meredith slowly returned the nod.
Chapter 48: Eric, 2009
Eric was half-asleep, which was as deep of a sleep as he could get with the young man constantly moving above him in the upper bunk. It was the afternoon, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it was night because the light in the jail cell was never turned off. The detention officers didn’t seem to care when inmates slept or whether they ate what passed as food at the jail. They only cared if there was trouble, and Eric didn’t intend to make any, so he stayed quiet and tried to blend into the gray paint of the cell.
He was supposed to have an arraignment hearing within forty-eight hours. That was if a prosecut
or filed charges against him. His attorney had told him this, but it had been over twenty-four hours and he still knew nothing about when he’d face a judge or if bail would be set. Even if bail was set, Eric didn’t have much to his name with most his contractor earnings going to pay for his house and utilities. He imagined his clients trying to reach him, wondering why the hell he didn’t show up to work on their houses. Most of his thoughts, though, were about Sam and why she hadn’t tried to call or visit him. By now, she had to know about his arrest.
He guessed it was late afternoon when a different detention officer, this one older with tired eyes, came to his cell. He figured the officer was there for his cellmate, who was sweating profusely and shaking on the top bunk.
“Sir, I think he needs to see a doctor,” Eric said to the officer. “He’s been throwing up a lot.”
The officer barely glanced at Eric’s cellmate. “Him? Oh, he’ll be fine by tomorrow. You have a visitor.”
Eric followed the officer back to the visitation room. Sam was already there on the other side of the Plexiglas, waiting for him. She swallowed hard once she saw him, like she was holding back a wave of tears.
She smiled, but Eric saw she looked pale and exhausted. She was being strong for him. One thing he loved about her, how he could see her and know she was solid and real no matter what crazy shit was happening around him. His mom would’ve used the phrase “calming presence.” That’s what Sam was for him.
They both picked up the receivers on either side of the glass. He heard Sam sharply inhale before she said, “We’re a goddamn mess, aren’t we?”
Then she told him about seeing Meredith. She started to say something else, but she paused.
“She doesn’t want to get a paternity test,” Sam said. “I think she knows Caleb’s your father’s kid, but I might be able to talk her into doing one to be sure.”
Eric shook his head. “What does it matter now? I’m here.”
“It matters because you didn’t kill your father.” She gave him a slight smile. “Vickie did.”